From Page to Stage: How The Arts Passport Book Club is Rewriting the Rules of Reading
by Avery Anderson
Book clubs are great. They’re also, let’s be honest, sometimes predictable. You read a book, you meet in someone’s living room, you argue about whether the main character was “relatable,” and then you go home.
The Arts Passport Book Club, in partnership with Tombolo Books, is not that.
Every month, members crack open a book that’s in direct conversation with a piece of art happening in Tampa Bay right now. Then we step out of the pages and into the world — gathering in theatres, galleries, and museums to experience that work together. The book isn’t the end point; it’s the entry ticket to a bigger conversation.
It’s literature with a built-in encore.
On August 23rd, that means Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a fearless, genre-defying exploration of love, identity, and queer family-making. After the last page, we will take those ideas off the bookshelf and into the Museum of Fine Arts, pairing our discussion with a private tour of In the Out / Out the In. For members, the book and admission are free — but the real value is in watching a gallery full of strangers become co-conspirators in curiosity.
October brings a hometown twist: Lies in Bone by award-winning playwright and novelist Natalie Symons. It’s a darkly funny excavation of family secrets, read in the very place where Symons will sit down with us to talk about it — freeFall Theatre. Then, just weeks later, you can see her on the same stage in Deathtrap. It’s a rare chance to meet an author when the ink (and the stage makeup) are still fresh.
November takes us into more solemn territory. We’ll read Elie Wiesel’s Night, timed to coincide with the anniversary of Kristallnacht, then gather at the newly reopened Florida Holocaust Museum for a tour. It’s a pairing that turns reading into an act of remembrance — and a reminder that the page can be a place of witness.
And in December, we go bilingual and big-hearted with My Broken Language by Quiara Alegría Hudes, followed by a group outing to Latin History for Morons at Stageworks Theatre. Come for the memoir, stay for John Leguizamo’s rapid-fire history lesson-slash-comedy masterclass, and leave with your head spinning in the best way.
The throughline? Each month’s selection is more than a book. It’s a map — one that leads to a seat in a theatre, a spot in a gallery, or a quiet corner in a museum where art and audience can meet without a middleman.
For Arts Passport members, the perks are tangible: free books picked up at Tombolo Books, free or discounted tickets, and the kind of access you can’t get from Amazon’s “Customers Also Bought” section. But the bigger draw is this: the chance to belong to a community that treats reading not as a solitary act, but as a spark for something larger.
Because here, the story doesn’t stop when you close the book. That’s just when it starts getting good.